Stuck on sidelines again for the Boston Marathon. I was told by the ortho doc and a couple of PT’s that my injured knee could take six months to recover. It’s been four, and it’s starting to feel better.
Here’s a brief look at the scene this morning, as the second wave of the 27,000 participants was queuing up for the starting line that’s way up over the hill. Carol can be glimpsed at the end ducking through a corral, followed by Eric, who waves.
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For nearly fifteen years, until about fifteen years ago, I was a frequent business traveler. I spent a lot of time in airports, rental cars, and hotels. Back then, before the Internet and laptops with wifi, newspapers and magazines were essential for a long flight.
The rental cars were often the most interesting part of the trips, because they were almost always American, and they turned me into a student of automotive awfulness. The rare times I was given a Toyota, the contrast was striking. Everything from the seating position to the placement of controls, and the feeling of quality, to the lack of “funny noises,” was vastly superior to anything I rented with a GM or Ford nameplate.
The low point for me was when a brand-new Pontiac Grand Am stalled and left me stranded on my way to an airport. Cell phones for consumers were almost non-existent, and I was stuck having to leave the car in the middle of the road so I could find a payphone to call the rental agency. I started declaring that “GM is doomed,” and I made a point of seeing ‘Roger & Me’, by Michael Moore. Then I read a book I’d seen reviewed in Business Week, called ‘Rivethead’, by Ben Hamper, with a forward by Moore. It was an honest, and unflattering, portrait of the working stiff side of GM.
I was reminded of ‘Rivethead’ a few weeks ago, when ‘This American Life’ devoted a show to the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. plant, aka NUMMI (KNEW-me), a joint venture between GM and Toyota. With GM having to be rescued from the brink of oblivion, and Toyota now having quality problems of its own, this program answers the questions, “what made the Japanese so good (with some exceptions), and why is American quality so variable from one plant to another?”
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/nummi
I have high hopes for ‘The Lost Skeleton Returns Again’, the sequel to ‘The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra’, an exquisitely funny and intelligent homage to cheapie 60’s sci-fi movies. If ‘Returns Again’ is even half as good as its predecessor, I will enjoy it immensely. Click here to watch ten samples from the new movie, which should be out on DVD to see the light of my projector’s bulb sometime this summer.
Larry Blamire, the creator of ‘Lost Skeleton’, has Boston fan roots going back to the 70’s. I happen to have a 1979 issue of ‘Galileo, the Magazine of Science Fiction’, with a story illustration by Blamire. I wonder if he still feels a connection to this, or if it seems far from where his interests are now?
Back in February, I pointed out a controversy caused by a political cartoon from December, by Mark Fiore, who has won the Pulitzer Prize. And he’s the first to do it with animated cartoons.
But before this good news, it turns out that December was a doubly troublesome month for Fiore, because that was when his iPhone app was rejected by Apple Computer. Why? Because it “ridicules public figures.”
Follow-up: Fiore submitted his app again, and this time it was accepted, but the decision had to come from Steve Jobs.
Lyricist Sir Tim Rice has a series on BBC Radio 2, called ‘Tim Rice’s American Pie‘. You have ’til tomorrow to listen to part 1, where he starts his sojourn in the state of Washington, home of Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Bing Crosby, and Les Paul. Note that the volume control on the BBC iPlayer Console goes to 11.
A fictionalized event in the life of Abe Lincoln is the subject of a restored 1913 movie, starring Francis Ford, the brother of legendary director John Ford, as a rather short version of the 16th President. The Boston Globe has this item about the discovery of the film, and you can hear more about it on New Hampshire public radio.
Was Francis Ford Coppola named after the actor? I’ll let you look that up for yourself. For a lot more on Francis Ford, see this well-researched article in senses of cinema.
